In the summer of 1942, Gerda Seifer was 15 years old and hiding in a small, pitch-black cellar while Nazis hunted Polish Jews in the streets above.

Seifer, now 85, rapped her hand on a coffee table in her Long Beach home to imitate the sound of hobnailed boots as the German soldiers marched.

Thump, thump, thump.

Every time she heard those steps in the darkness, she thought her time had arrived. She thought she was going to Belzec, where a half million or more Jews, other Poles and Gypsies were killed in gas chambers between March and December that year.

"They never came, but I didn't know that," Seifer said of the Germans. "You were constantly petrified. "

The only child of Henryk and Edyta Krebs, two college-educated Poles, Seifer spent six weeks in the 4-by-6-foot cellar.

When she emerged and was reunited with her father - who, as a textile maker, was protected as "useful" by the Nazis - she could tell something was wrong.

"Where's mommy?" Seifer remembered asking.

He told her what she didn't want to hear. Edyta had stayed in the Lwow (now Lvov, Ukraine) ghetto to take care of Seifer's 11-year-old cousin, who was too afraid to hide.

Her mother was gone forever, Seifer discovered later, taken to the Belzec extermination camp.

Germany invades

When Germany attacked and conquered Poland in September 1939, the eastern part of the country where Seifer lived was quickly given to the Soviet Union under terms of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact.

Men like her father had to be wary of the Soviets, who rounded up businessmen and others undesirable to the communists, to be sent to gulags east of the Ural Mountains in places such as Siberia.

Her family had to be vigilant, she thought, but they would survive the war.

It was not to be. Germany only used the treaty for protection while it fought the Allies in Western Europe, and in June 1941, the Nazis launched Operation Barbarossa, a four million-strong invasion of the Soviet Union.

It wasn't long before eastern Poland was overrun again and Seifer and her fellow Jews began hearing rumors.

Jews were disappearing. They were being identified by their white arm bands with a blue Star of David and taken to a local mountain by the truckload and killed. There were gas chambers at a place called Auschwitz.

"It was so horrible that we said, someone is telling a story," Seifer said. "It can't be. "

It was all true. As the brutality increased, parents who worked concealed their children in drawers in the morning - some of them as young as 3 - and told them to make no sound until the end of the day.

"You were so scared, you were willing to lie quietly, even as a child," said Seifer.

Not long after her mother was taken, Seifer's father paid a Polish Catholic woman to take her in; Seifer masqueraded as the woman's daughter.

Until the war ended, she took care of the woman's children and worked as an unpaid servant, constantly fearful that the Germans would discover her secret or a Polish neighbor would reveal her identity.

Henryk, who Seifer said did not have apparent Jewish features, came up with a plan to use forged papers to go to Germany, where he thought he would be safer. He kept a cyanide capsule in his belt in case he was captured.

Later, she heard that he was discovered after some friends begged him to take them with him and a Pole pointed him out on a street when he went out to get food for the men.

Seifer doesn't know if her father was able to use the cyanide.

"I never found out what really happened," she said.

The war ends

Of the 40 family members in Nazi-occupied territory, only two survived, including Seifer.

After the war, she moved to England, became a nurse, then immigrated to New York City, where she met her husband Harold Seifer, a doctor. They moved to Long Beach in 1956 and have three children and four grandchildren.

For the last 40 years, Seifer has spoke to junior high, high school and university students about her experience to make sure the memory of those who were killed is kept alive, a mission that is increasingly important as the number of survivors dwindle.

Today, Seifer said she rarely cries about the unimaginable terror that only those who experienced it or the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust knew.

"I've toughened, I guess, or I've cried enough that I can't cry anymore," she said.

But she did remember a time when her youngest daughter wrote a poem as student at Wilson High School. In the poem, her daughter is looking in a mirror:I see the eyes, that looked like my eyes. That's my grandmother who I never knew.

"When I read that, I just burst out crying," said Seifer.

Seventy years after those awful days, stooped with age but still strong of mind, she said what happened needs to be talked about.